1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to maintaining status of devices in a network. In particular, the invention relates to systems and methods for efficiently reporting device status in a network. Still more particularly, the invention relates to reporting device status in a Voice over IP network.
2. Description of the Background Art
Status reporting is an important aspect of every system comprising a number of devices that can have one or more states. The network devices keep track of other devices in the network by receiving and updating status of the other devices. While staying updated regarding the status of other entities is important, it comes at the cost of consuming resources of the network and network devices to send and receive status updates.
The problem of overloading the network and network devices becomes even more acute in a network where a large number of entities change state at the same instant. For example, when a network or a network node comprising a large number of entities restarts, all the entities in the restarted node transmit their updated status to other entities in the network. The result is a network congested with status update messages and network entities overloaded with receiving a large number of status updates.